3 results
The Eastern Question in Europe and Asia
In the late-19th century, European politics were troubled by what had come to be called the “Eastern Question,” the fate of the 600-year Ottoman Empire. Once encompassing the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia (present-day Turkey), most of the Arab Middle East, and the Balkan Peninsula, by 1886 the empire had shrunk dramatically as a result of wars with European powers, Russia in particular, and revolts by subject peoples. This 1886 map, published in London, shows the Turkish Empire as comprised mainly of Albania, Thrace, Crete, Anatolia, and parts of the Arab ...
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Austria-Hungary
The Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire governed by a dual monarchy that exercised Habsburg rule across Europe’s second largest sovereign territory. Although considered a Great Power in the concert of European nations, the empire was internally divided by internecine quarrels among its national minorities and ultimately broke up under the strains of World War I. This 1906 Rand McNally map shows the empire in the decade before its dissolution. William Rand founded the company that became Rand McNally in Chicago in 1856, initially to print guidebooks ...
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Ethnographic Map of the Balkan Peninsula
The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I transformed the political organization of the Balkans. The war had started in the Balkans with the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a militant Bosnian Serb seeking independence for his country from the dual empire. Jovan Cvijić, the author of this “ethnographic map” of the Balkans, published in 1918 by the American Geographical Society of New York, was a professor of geography at the University of Belgrade. Cvijić completed his doctorate at the University of ...
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